Being aware of confirmation bias

A trap that I think I fell into a lot in earlier phases of my practice was to think that an idea was good because I had it. This led to a lot of one-way-door situations, in which I would make a change, listen to it to confirm that it was good, and then keep moving forward.

But what if the idea wasn’t actually good? That wasn’t a thought that entered my worldview a lot when I was younger. Not to say that I didn’t have self-doubt — I was wracked by it constantly! But perhaps particularly because of that, I desperately wanted wins, so I looked for them everywhere, and found them in places where they didn’t actually exist.

This feels deeply human to me; we all want to be good at something. But it didn’t always get me the best results. It’s so easy to get used to something — so the implication of this is that, if I make a small change to something that might not be for the best, and I don’t catch it immediately, I will quickly get used to it, and then it will be baked into the song forever.

So the trick is to catch it quickly!

With this in mind, my process when I make a change now is simple: listen to it, and then listen to it the previous way. And, without judging, just listen for which way feels better to me. Sometimes it’s the new way — but sometimes it’s the original way. And this is valuable information! I don’t want to make something slightly less good because of some need to be right or to have a little win in a vulnerable moment.

Instead, I can reframe the situation: by working as much as possible outside of self-judgment and ego, and by doing my conscious best always to make decisions in service of the song, I can in theory end up with the best possible version of the song. And that’s the biggest win of all.

It’s happening to meeeee — jamie